Federal agents charged four Georgia men they say are part of a fringe militia group with plotting to attack government officials with explosives and the biotoxin ricin, prosecutors in Atlanta announced Tuesday. A government informant recorded the men discussing plans to manufacture ricin, a highly poisonous substance derived from castor beans, and attack Justice Department officials, federal judges and Internal Revenue Service agents, according to court papers released Tuesday afternoon. Prosecutors said the public was never in imminent danger. All four suspects were in custody and are scheduled to make their initial court appearances Wednesday in Gainesville, about 50 miles...

Your tax dollars were hard at work but so far nobody knows how many were spent to deploy 500 Michigan State Police officers to guard the state capitol and Right to Work demonstrators last month. Five hundred is darn close close to half the entire force. “I’m waiting to find out,” advises Inspector Gene Adamczyk, who was calling the shots on that historic day when 12,000 angry protestors showed up to battle for and against the RTW legislation that was eventually adopted and signed by the governor. The inspector says there were times when “we were hanging by the skin...

Dennis Gartman wasn't too happy with the deal. First he criticized it for being overtly anti-marriage. Second, he said it failed to tackle the "egregious lack of discipline on spending" and said President Obama was leading the country towards socialism. Finally, he was also critical of the fact that this bill originated in the Senate, whereas he writes, "according to the Constitution all fiscally related legislation must originate in the House." His take on the fiscal cliff deal: "We’ve no great disagreement with the legislation as it stands except for the fact that this is an overtly anti- marriage decision...

a vote to legalize same-sex marriage in Illinois looking less likely to happen in the next few days, supporters of marriage equality are looking ahead to the following legislative session as their next best hope. A Senate committee voted 8-5 late Thursday in favor of a bill that would allow gay marriage. But with key supporters absent, Senate Democrats delayed a full floor vote. The Senate then canceled its Friday schedule, and President John Cullerton said lawmakers are unlikely to return to Springfield before the session ends Jan. 9. New lawmakers will be sworn into office that day. Sen. Heather...

Mexican Narcoterrorist Region May Abandon Catholicism for Islam It would seem as if Bishop Ruiz’s brand of Liberation Theology has had the same effect on Chiapas as on Europe. Chiapas is poor, but it’s now also appearing to trend Islamic as any region under the influence of the left eventually does. When you kill the local religion and replace it with social justice, foreign religions eventually take its place. In the mid-1990s, a leftist resistance group which calls itself The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) made Chiapas its home. Its attempts to fight the Mexican Army repeatedly failed, but...

Ted Cruz, a Republican, represents Texas in the Senate. Since Election Day, much energy has been spent analyzing why Republicans did so poorly. Many have urged that Republicans must Â“moderate their views,Â” by which they mean we should adopt more policies of Democrats. That advice misdiagnoses the problem. The 2012 election did not reflect popular approval of the Obama policies of out-of-control spending, taxes, deficits and debt. To the contrary, 51 percent of voters on Election Day agreed that Â“government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.Â” Nor did the election reflect satisfaction with the paltry...

The rout was complete, the retreat disorderly. President Obama got his tax hikes — naked of spending cuts — passed by the ostensibly Republican House of Representatives. After which, you might expect him to pivot to his self-proclaimed “principle” of fiscal “balance” by taking the lead on reducing spending. “Why,” asked The Post on the eve of the final fiscal-cliff agreement, “is the nation’s leader not embracing and then explaining the balanced reforms the nation needs?” Because he has no interest in them. He’s a visionary, not an accountant. Sure, he’ll pretend to care about deficits, especially while running for...

Conservative America can't get enough of the story about liberal former Vice President Al Gore selling the Current TV network he co-founded to Al Jazeera. Or, as Fox News commentator Ann Coulter described it - "a foreign company that hates America."........ .......Despite what perceptions remain about its political bias, analysts say Al Jazeera has developed a strong journalistic reputation with international audiences as it reports from places that U.S. outlets, with their scaled-down overseas reporting staffs, barely touch. Aside from the media implications, some analysts wonder how Gore, a part-time San Francisco resident who won the Nobel Peace Prize for...

New Hampshire State Representative Cynthia Chase believes that the principles of liberty, sound money, and free markets are a threat to her state and society as a whole. Her rather unflattering viewpoints on libertarian principles stems from the growing movement known as the Free State Project. Here is her opinion on the Free State Project and freedom as a whole: “In the opinion of this Democrat, Free Staters are the single biggest threat the state is facing today. There is, legally, nothing we can do to prevent them from moving here to take over the state, which is their openly...

Former US Representative Gabrielle Giffords will visit Newtown, Conn., the site of last month's deadly shooting in which 20 first graders were killed. Giffords survived a mass shooting in her home state of Arizona two years ago... ... Giffords plans to attend a private event at a local home on Friday, Steven Jensen, spokesman for Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman, said in an email. The event will have no media access and Giffords' plans are still developing and may change

Feminism is partly to blame for the breakdown of the family, one of Labour’s most senior female politicians has said. Diane Abbott, the party’s public health spokesman, said that major issues facing society “stem from family breakdown”. And in a surprise admission from one of the Left’s most outspoken feminists, she conceded that women’s rights campaigners have neglected the family. Abbott, a divorced mother with one son, also highlighted the harmful impact on society of internet pornography and fast food. … In a nod to Labour orthodoxy, Abbott said: “When I talk about stable families, I do not only mean...

Business investors are confident the eurozone has weathered the worst of the sovereign debt crisis, according to European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso. In a speech given to Portuguese diplomats in Lisbon on Thursday (3 January), the former Portuguese leader said that “the perception of risk in the eurozone has disappeared.” He added: “Investors have understood that when European leaders commit themselves to doing everything to safeguard the integrity of the euro, they mean business.” … Last month, German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble also told reporters the euro has survived the worst of the crisis, following a buy-back deal on...

I said this after Hurricane Sandy and I'll say it again. Chris Christie has started to grow on me. And no, that's not meant as a joke. Christie's straight talk of late may be just more bullying by a master politician, but it sure does ring true to me. In a parched partisan landscape where every move is done for political gain - "It's why the American people hate Congress," he said - Christie's tell-it-like-it-is rhetoric serves as needed refreshment for the masses. In case you missed it, the enraged New Jersey governor went off on his fellow Republicans Wednesday...

The world is starting to win the war against tuberculosis, but drug-resistant forms pose a new threat. If there was any doubt that tuberculosis (TB) was fighting back, it was dispelled in 2005, at the Church of Scotland Hospital in the village of Tugela Ferry, South Africa. Doctors at the hospital, in a rough, remote corner of KwaZulu-Natal province, were hardened to people dying from gunshots and AIDS. But even they were puzzled and frightened when patients with HIV who were responding well to antiretroviral drugs began dying — rapidly — from TB. With ordinary TB, patients start to feel...

Chairman Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority signed orders, Thursday, directing all PA institutions to stop using the term "Palestinian National Authority" on official documents and to replace the term with "the state of Palestine". The change went into effect immediately, and was applied to official documents, seals and medals. .....

It seems you can’t debase your coinage these days even if you try. The Bank of England is straining every sinew to drive down sterling with quantitative easing, and what happens? The Swiss National Bank trumps Threadneedle Street with an outright blitz of Gilt purchases. They just print it, and buy. The Swiss and UK central banks are effectively fighting a "low intensity" currency war against each other. It has come to this. Here is the offending chart from the IMF (Picture editor's note: apologies for poor quality, unable to find better version): And this is what the Swiss did...

It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time1. Their technique opens the door to generating negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices, and it could even help to solve a cosmological mystery. Lord Kelvin defined the absolute temperature scale in the mid-1800s in such a way that nothing could be colder than absolute zero. Physicists later realized that the absolute temperature of a gas is related to the average energy of its particles. Absolute zero corresponds to the theoretical state in which particles have no...